Debbi Flittner

Debbi moved to the Arizona red rock canyon country as a child. She quit school when she was fourteen years old, married at eighteen, and gave birth to a daughter at nineteen. She moved to New Mexico in her early twenties, and fell in love with the Land of Enchantment. As a single mother she raised a child and attended UNM, cultivating a love of literature and writing before majoring in political science and attending law school. While in law school, she clerked for a criminal defense law firm in Albuquerque, was an externing student clerk for the New Mexico Court of Appeals in Santa Fe, then spent a year as a student assistant district attorney for the 13th Judicial District in Albuquerque. Following graduation, she worked for the nonpartisan office of the Legislative Council at the state capitol--The Roundhouse--in Santa Fe.

A move to the Pacific Northwest showed her that, in spite of these achievements, her heart was longing for something deeper. Devoting herself to a meditation and yoga practice upended her personal and professional life. She eventually returned to academia and trained at Pacifica Graduate Institute, a Jungian-influenced school of psychology and mythology. There, she recognized her desire to help others, particularly women, overcome early life struggles she had identified as her own “invisible electric fence,” that kept her living inside a limiting culture and belief system.

She began her psychotherapy practice, integrating yoga and non-dual teachings into her work. She also began writing stories about her early life with her mother. She spent eight years learning basic writing skills necessary to shape the stories into her debut book. The Ten Thousand Things was finally born--a coming of age memoir of life inside an indifferent family system that had no hope and no plan for her. She hopes readers find something of themselves in her book that validates the beauty of who they most deeply are, what they have lived through, and points them to the luminous potential we all carry inside.